Designing a Web site for a multinational research project

This paper discusses the problems and possible solutions for making a project place Web site to be used in a multinational research project. The most important function of a project place Web site has in our case proven to be a file archive. It enables all members of the project to share and access important information and research results. Since the file archive is most important it has shown to be a good solution to make it the central part of the project place Web site. Additional features can then be designed as complements to this central feature. It appears that the site is used rather sparingly between meetings with an average of only one login per day. At the time just before a meeting the site traffic has increased as the members are uploading files to be reviewed at the upcoming project meeting. It is pretty safe to assume that the traffic on the project site will drop during the meeting and then increase right after the meeting when project members will start to share information and research results that has been discussed during the meeting. As time goes by the traffic will probably drop to a low level again when the groups will continue their appointed tasks each on their own.